Barbara Sehr has a steady algorithm that dances to a different aerial density. OK, she's a funny technical writer who brings out her recently diminished profile, her artificial intelligence, and her native German sense of humor. Despite all that, she is not only funny — she is the only known journalist to interview Bill Gates as both a male and female reporter. Visit her Web site: www.liftingthefog.com

Teabaggers Part Deux

Last week, in this space, I appear to have awakened a movement larger than the one I achieved prior to my last colonoscopy. Who could have thought that government resentful “teabaggers” existed here in the rain forests of the Puget Sound?

After my recent personal encounter with these activists in the other Washington, I imagined that they were simply part of the extensive production capability of FOX News. Who would have thunk that they are very much alive and well and reading blogs here at Seattlepi.com?

It would appear at first glance that my experiences with the East Coast tribes of the Tea Party movement did not achieve much sympathy with the local chapters. Perhaps if I possessed the good looks and moneyed style of Sarah Palin I might have been greeted as a liberator and party functionary. Apparently, my “good looks” do not meet the standards of some of you. In some of the now-deleted comments on last week’s installment, readers made it quite clear that my looks were not even close to the standards of Flip Wilson’s “Geraldine” or even Milton Berle.

This was the obvious cause of the consistent inaccuracy in everything I wrote, according to many of you. I have made my share of errors over 30 years of writing for newspapers and magazines, so I don’t mind a little nudge from a vast audience of self-proclaimed copy editors. Still, typically, when my accuracy is questioned, real copy editors generally discover a fact that goes beyond my outward appearance.

I did have mixed emotions regarding the emails from some of you who went to the trouble of familiarizing yourself with the “Google” thingie and looked me up on the Internets. One might have hoped that you would have also looked up some background material on your point. Instead, I was greeted with a finding on my intelligence quotient. Considering how some of you greet the President of the United States, and my own mixed-gender history, I should appreciate being called a “stupid (word that refers to a female dog) or a four-letter word starting with “c” that rhymes with a term which describes a baseball hitting procedure designed to advance a runner.

Yes, some of you did confront me with a fair argument that I “started it all” by referring to the group that I confronted in DC as “teabaggers.” Yet, this is the term that was used by the very founders of the movement in Hartford, Connecticut just days after the President signed the stimulus bill in February of 2009. There are even signs at Tea Party movement events that proclaim “I’m proud to be a teabagger.” The fact that the founders did not spot the double meaning of the word on the Internets, does not make it not so.
The closest anyone came to confronting me with facts is the statement that the tea party movement “is concerned by the growing size of government.” That may be true, yet the concern appears to be happening far too late to be effective.

Had some of the activists joined the rallies against the war in Iraq in 2003, not to mention the protests against the Bush tax cuts for the top one percent, the deficit might not have exploded to the point it was when President Obama was inaugurated. Even back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was running the government into deficits every single year. Reagan’s own Budget director even testified years later that part of the strategy for running a deficit was to keep the government from expanding social welfare programs. Grover Norquist, a top GOP consultant said it even more bluntly, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

I’ve lost more than 130 pounds in the past three years, which apparently still doesn’t make me pretty enough for some of you. Still, I was blessed with an ability to find the flab in modern-day journalism. Like my own health prior to my weight loss, I worried constantly about when the poor judgment about what I took in would come home to haunt me. I came close to drowning in the bathtub that I created. The government does a lot of good in all of our lives and we don’t have to drown it in a bathtub just to keep it from needing a diaper change once in a while.

If that was where the tea party movement was headed, I would be the first to staple tea bags to my hat.